Most of the Manics' follies delight me to some extent; going on stage at Glasto and saying they should build a bypass over the site and wishing AIDS on Michael Stipe is obviously gratuitously provocative and maybe if a band I hated did it I'd be righteously disapproving, but since it's Nicky it just gives me a giggle of childish glee (and I loved REM). Likewise toiletgate; it's just an amusing sideshow to me.
Some of the criticism of their recent decisions feels a bit more serious to me. Journal for Plague Lovers was not Metal Machine Music and didn't deserve to be talked up as such; it included many punchy, catchy, immediately loveable songs, and it would have been worth testing out stuff like 'Me and Stephen Hawking' and 'Peeled Apples' as singles. Maybe they would have bombed. It's a poor market for rock singles at the moment. But they would have been a more honourable bombing than the commercial, safe Postcards singles.
The treatment of PFAYM is the one that bothers me the most. One year on and I'm really coming to enjoy it, but it bothers me that there's three dull singles frontloaded onto it (one of which - the title track - is basically a rewrite of 'The Second Great Depression' from Send Away The Tigers) before you get onto the great stuff like 'Golden Platitudes', 'A Billion Balconies Facing The Sun', 'The Future Has Been Here 4Ever' and 'Don't Be Evil' on the second half. Really, putting the best song on the album on last is pretty insane.
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"Sean always looks really miserable in photos..." ~ Nicky Wire
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